Bigger and Bigger

The scale of the universe is so vast that it can be hard to grasp. One of the best ways to comprehend it is by starting on a relatively small scale with our home planet, Earth, and working outwards

- Giles Sparrow

“ The universe as a whole is expanding”

1 Earth Earth’s diameter is 12,756 kilometres (7,926 miles). The Moon orbits Earth at an average of 384,400 kilometres (238,855 miles).

2 Solar system The outermost planet in the Solar System, Neptune, orbits the Sun at a distance of 4.5 billion kilometres (2.8 billion miles).

3 living local Stars in our local region of space are separated by light years – tens of trillions of kilometres. The brightest star in the sky, Sirius, is 8.6 light-years away.

4 home galaxy Our Sun and Solar System, and all the stars in our sky, are members of the Milky Way – a vast spiral of stars that’s roughly 120,000 light-years across.

5 Grouping up The Milky Way is a major member of a small galaxy cluster called the Local Group, occupying a volume of space about 10 million light-years across.

6 Big cluster The Local Group is an outlying region of our local galaxy supercluster, sometimes called the Virgo or Laniakea Supercluster. It is over 100 million light-years long.

7 empty space The Virgo Supercluster is part of a local supercluster complex a billion light-years across. At this level, the large-scale structure of filaments and empty voids begins to emerge.

8 Far-reaching The observable universe has a diameter of about 93 billion light-years based on the current locations of regions that we can see.